Good Little Player!
Written: Nov 20 '00 (Updated Nov 22 '00)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Compact design, great sound quality, sturdy
Cons: Awful FM reception, sometimes finicky media
|
|
|
| krmidas's Full Review: Creative Technology Nomad Jukebox (32 MB) MP3 Play... |
I've been living with the Nomad 64 for about 6 months now, and am generally quite pleased.
Sound quality is excellent: bitrate of 128 seems to give audio quality better than FM,but not quite CD. I find for most types of music, this sampling level is quite sufficient. However, in music with a large dynamic range (classical, solo piano, etc.), at this sampling rate you will occasionally you pick up weird little audio artifacts (tinniness, compression). But this is really only a little nit. In finding the compromise between file size and audio quality, 128 seems to be the accepted level of sampling. And at this rate the Nomad will give you a little over an hour of music.
The little earbud earphones sound quite good, I think. Their output level is quite high, compared to traditional stereo headphones (which will force you to crank the volume on the Nomad to get acceptable volume). My only complaint with the included earphones is that they get uncomfortable after about 45 minutes or so, and the slightest tug on the wire will dislodge it from your ear. But I find this symptomatic of all earphones of this type.
The interface between the Nomad and your computer is pretty slick. The Nomad rests in it's charging cradle, which is tethered to your PC via parallel port. The included software guides you through dubbing your selections from PC (sorry, no Mac compatibility) to Nomad. The Nomad has 32 megs of internal memory, and another 32 via a Smartmedia card (the same kind that's in your digital camera). You have to carefully program your selections to fit as much music on each media, since a song can't flow from one to another: it's like when you used to try and tape an album on a 60 minute cassette (30 minutes per side). My unit seems to have an intermittent problem with a corrupted section of memory. Every so often, a song will get chopped off when I play it back on my Nomad. I will then re-format the internal memory and Smart Media card and re-program the whole thing, only to have a similar glitch in another song! Sometimes it doesn't happen at all, so I'm not sure if there's a defect or not.
Equalization options are minimal: several different EQ settings ("classic, jazz, rock, normal") are a little crude (some settings make the sound muffled---not sure why you'd want that). I'd prefer separate bass/treble/loudness boost.
Skipping between tracks is a little tiresome, especially going backwards: you have to press the backward key fast enough to avoid perpetually re-starting the song you're on. And if you want to skip ahead or back within a song, the shuttle function never speeds up past it's basic (3x?) rate: this can be a real pain if the selection is 20 minutes long.Why not have it kick up to higher rate after a few seconds?
I find the Nomad's other features either unnecessary or so inferior that they're unusable. In the unnecessary area: "Shuffle" option (repeat/all, etc) seems superfluous since you can program selections into your Nomad in whatever sequence you want.
In the inferior area---the FM radio. In theory, it's a terrific idea. Bored of your 1 hour of music? Listen to the radio. Unfortunately, the antenna (where it is I have no idea) is so useless, that you'll be lucky if you can pick up more than 2 or 3 stations, and even those will be filled with static. Oh, and it's FM only.
There's also a voice recorder. Audio quality is terrible (phone quality), but never having owned a personal dictaphone, maybe this is the norm.
All in all, it does what I bought it to do quite well: play MP3 files. Everything else would have been icing.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
krmidas
|
|
Member: Tom Keramidas
Location: Barrington, IL
Reviews written: 3
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.